A Perry Mason that doesn’t trust institutions
In the HBO reboot, even the deacons and the police are corrupt.
The new HBO reboot of Perry Mason has all the components of a prestige drama: an outstanding cast, a complex plot, violence and gore, and a brooding antihero as a main character. But its most daring component is its insistence that the grittiest, most dangerous work takes place inside conventional institutions like a courtroom.
Created by fiction writer Erle Stanley Gardner, the Perry Mason character is familiar to most Americans from the 1960s television show, which starred Raymond Burr as the brilliant defense attorney who takes impossible cases and cracks them on the stand. This reboot imagines an origin story for Mason (played now by Matthew Rhys), whom we meet as a down-on-his-luck private eye. He’s taking photos of movie stars having illicit sex as he struggles to hang on to his family dairy farm near the Mexican border.
At the start of the show, Mason has all the hallmarks of a classic noir detective. He is haunted by his service in World War I, he drinks too much, and he rarely sees his kid. But his wound goes deeper: everywhere he has been taught to look for American values, he sees corruption—the military, the police, the law. He feels the pain of this too much to let it go. His knowledge becomes a yoke of cynicism wearing him down, but his cynicism is also an armor worn to protect a tender heart that wants to believe that justice and truth are possible.
